I was reading an article this morning about how to turn your business around through effective knowledge management (this topic interests me quite a bit, and I wrote about it just a few short months ago).

The article I’ve linked to however, is in fact about enterprise search (while there is a caveat about half way through the article about progress working practices being necessary to thrive, the article is not really about knowledge management in general).

While I think the article title would have been more accurate if you replaced ‘knowledge management’ with ‘enterprise search’, it’s a small detail. There are also some important generalizations about search in this article, which, while still being generalizations, paint a somewhat accurate picture of the state of search. I found this paragraph particularly interesting:

Overwhelmingly, it [enterprise search] was felt it wasn’t meeting the needs of businesses – 63% of those surveyed stated that they believed enterprise search tools should be as easy for staff to use as consumer search engines, yet two thirds said that wasn’t currently the case. The study also discovered widespread concern about lengthy set up times – 73% said they believed it would take more than six months for an enterprise search tool to be useable by employees, with a staggering 68% stating they thought it would take between 18 months to two years to generate any return on investment (ROI). A further 19% estimated it would take over two years to generate ROI.

I’m not really that surprised that 63% of people found that search should be as easy to use as web search engines — but I’m incredibly surprised that 37% didn’t think that. I would have been very interested to know what that 37% of users did expect — that they’d have to put together more queries? That the interface would be more difficult to use? More time wading through irrelevant results?

I find the ROI question a bit too general to really tell us very much. Enterprise search is obviously a major technology deployment, and I don’t think there are really many large-scale deployments that anyone would say generate immediate return on investment (not to mention it’s often difficult to measure the return on investment in these cases — if you upgrade your time and expense system, how do you measure the return on that investment?). And again, without knowing why they felt the ROI would take so long to mature, it’s difficult to gauge the potential veracity of their gut feelings on search ROI.

The article concludes by stating that decision-makers don’t feel that enterprise search is adding much immediate ROI — and the statistics presented would seem to back that up. Yet enterprise search instances abound, and I would put forward that more than 32% (presumably the number who apparently felt that ROI would take less than 18 months) of organizations are venturing into enterprise search. I don’t have any stats to back that up, but if it is true, it would again be interesting to know why they are still doing it even though they feel the ROI’s very far down the road.

Finally, there’s the statement that the evidence presented in the article “illustrate[s] to what extent vendors are limiting the potential of their search tools by failing to take on feedback”. I think most vendors would be happy to improve their tools if there was an easy way to do it — improved search tools, after all, would help them sell their products.

I don’t think we can place the blame squarely on the vendors. It’s also often difficult for businesses to articulate the issues they’re having — and many of those issues fall outside the realm of the vendor. For instance, getting people to understand and use enhancements to the engine or interface takes time, and it’s not necessarily something the vendor can really do much about.

Feedback from an organization like ‘it takes too much to see any ROI on an enterprise search implementation’ is kind of a tough thing for vendors to really address. While vendors should be tailoring their toolset to ensure that ROI can be achieved sooner if possible, vendors should be helping their client’s decision-makers to understand that sometimes ROI just takes time.

So to answer the question I posed in the headline, no, I don’t think it’s that vendors just aren’t listening — it’s just that they don’t always have easy answers for their clients. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.